Posted on 12/24/2002 2:28:13 PM PST by knighthawk
Our take on 2002 AD (make that CE, copy desk!) is that it was a signal year for the advocates of political correctness, with the thought police trampling on the individual rights of many. (Eat your heart out, Naomi Klein.) And the usual handful of insensitive idiots did just plain dumb things for all the wrong reasons.
- At the Royal Ontario Museum, the system of dating exhibits from AD and BC was shelved in favour of the Christ-denying labels CE and BCE, whatever they may mean. And this was done --get this Monty Python! -- even as the ROM exhibited an ossuary said to be the burial box of James, brother of Jesus Christ. A ROM functionary, Dan Rahimi, said the aim is to make the museum more "inclusive." Using BC and AD was "really quite ethnocentric of European Christians," he explains.
William Thorsell, president of the ROM who once edited The Globe and Mail before the Brits launched a reverse takeover, should know better than to sanction this codswallop. But instead he went further this week, allowing the venerable museum to drop the crown from its logo and shed the monarchist "royal" as part of a rebranding makeover.
- Not to be outdone, Toronto City Hall staffers decreed -- at least until Mayor Mel belatedly over-ruled them -- that the festooned fir tree set up in Nathan Phillips Square was to be known as "the Holiday Tree."
- The Canadian Mint perpetuated the stupidity by selling coins marking "the 12 Days of Giving," instead of "the 12 Days of Christmas."
- Lovers of little creatures in the York Region bureaucracy built a passageway for a rare four-inch salamander under Bayview Avenue, only to find that proposed subdivisions will block the migratory movements of the little lizards.
- The Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario voted to remove Elizabeth Witmer, the new Education Minister, from its agenda because it was tired of the Tory government. With a dash of the pen, the Education Minister ceased to exist and the teachers rushed to fill the vacuum.
- Guilty! So said the Supreme Court of Canada when it upheld a Quebec appeal court that found it a crime to post a sign displaying French and English letters of the same size.
Quebec language law insists French must be double the size of any other language. (Who does the measuring, anyway?) The two shopkeepers from Knowlton, Que., are taking their case to the United Nations.
- At the Commonwealth Games last summer, Montreal swimmer Jennifer Carroll, a silver medallist, excitedly waved a Quebec flag as a gesture of thanks to her home province. It turned into a political flap when someone insisted she was declaring her support for Quebec sovereignty. Guys, sometimes a flag is just a flag!
- Meanwhile on Remembrance Day, bossy Bernie Landry, the Quebec Premier, suggested there was a parallel between the freedom won by Allied soldiers in the two world wars and the Quebec separatist struggle. A bit of a stretch.
- On the same day, the manager of a Home Depot store in Sudbury refused to let Ken Cook, a 71-year-old veteran, sell poppies outside in the cold in front of the store. Supporting a good cause might hurt sales.
- Ted Honderich, hitherto a deservedly obscure Canadian-born professor of philosophy in London, argued in a new book that Palestinian suicide bombers have "sanctified themselves" by engaging in "necessary killing."
- The dimwits at Canada Customs temporarily banned a newsletter from Israel as possible hate propaganda because it mentioned the Ayn Rand Institute, named for the libertarian author. To the thought police, Ayn has always been a threat.
- Bonnie Brown, Liberal MP for Oakville, and Colleen Beaumier, Liberal MP for adjacent Brampton-West-Mississauga, competed to be politically correct in the eyes of the pro-Palestinian cause. Bonnie, with a straight face, compared any American attack on Iraq to the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor. Colleen matched that by praising Saddam's Iraq kleptocracy as a "progressive" secular nation. Carolyn Parrish, yet another MP from the environs of Mississauga, decreed that Stewart Bell, a National Post reporter, should not write about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict unless he declared in every article his connection to B'nai B'rith, because the estimable Jewish community group had honoured him for his reportage.
The censorious Parrish wrote a letter to The Toronto Star suggesting terrorists had blown up themselves and innocent victims because they were "desperate." (Why, oh why, do the Liberal wingnuts come from the 905 belt? Why are they women? Perhaps, in the new year, Paul Wells or Andrew Coyne will enlighten us on this.)
- John Manley, the Deputy Prime Minister, pandering to the politically correct lobby's loathing for Her Majesty, predictably called for the abolition of the monarchy even as Elizabeth II arrived for a 12-day tour of Canada on the occasion of her Jubilee. And who was her official escort in Ottawa? The aforesaid Mr. Manley, that's who. Of course, he was denounced by monarchists and the Opposition for, among other sins, bad timing and rude, insulting and boorish behaviour.
- In a fuzzy article about academic freedom, leftist ideologues Shari Brotman and William Ryan, professors of social work at McGill, insisted that all the actions in their controversial Project Interaction protests were "peaceful" -- including "classroom disruptions." (Paging George Orwell. Would you please report to Project Interaction?)
- John Ralston Saul, the self-important and ever-so-politically correct consort to Adrienne Clarkson, the Queen's consort in these sub-Arctic regions, opined that Christianity was responsible for the Holocaust, totally missing the real point, which is that the Nazis were hardly Christian and most of the Allied troops who liberated the death camps were.
- In Toronto, car-jackers seized two motorists, robbed, gagged, handcuffed and blindfolded them, then, after driving them around for hours, released them with cab fare to go home. This, folks, is Toronto, where even the victims get a PC deal.
- The New York Times spiked two columns, one by Pulitzer Prize-winner Dave Anderson, on (of all things) the Masters golf tournament for not admitting women members to its Augusta club. Why? Because the sportswriters had dared to disagree with the editorial view of the Times. After a week of late-night talk-show ridicule, the NYT relented and published the offending pieces with some changes. The Toronto Star's Antonia Zerbisias was perhaps the only media critic (everyone's a media pundit these days, even my husband) who did not dump on the impeccably liberal Times for censorship.
- In Beirut, an A-list terrorist leader was an invited guest at a "human rights" seminar attended by Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. A French journalist, who happened to be Jewish, had his credentials lifted because of his race. Asked to comment on this outrage, in which Canada was complicit by the PM's presence, Chrétien joked in his fractured English that, "They treat me really well here."
- Six months to the day after Sept. 11, a Florida flying school received belated word from the politically adept paper-shufflers at the U.S. immigration service that it had issued visas allowing Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi to enrol as students. They piloted the hijacked planes that hit the twin towers in New York.
- Back in Pakistan, a village tribal court sentenced a teenage girl to be gang-raped as a punishment for her brother being seen in public with an upper-caste girl. After the sentence had been carried out by four men as hundreds of villagers laughed and cheered, the girl was forced to walk home naked.
Next week: The Jillys, our annual year-end awards for deeds both notorious and meritorious.
CE = Common era.....BCE = Before Common Era
Dissapointingly, I've even seen National Review use those acronyms (or whatever they are).
Are they 'Differently Multi-Oriented'?
Or 'Variably Sexually Responsive'?
'Never a Dull Moment'?
'Pre-verted'?
==========
I don't know about the 905 belt, but, brother, more than once I too have wondered why on earth are so many of these "Liberal wingnuts" women?
"I think you're some kind of deviated pre-vert!" -- Col "Bat" Guano
"You'll have to answer to the Coca-Cola company..."
Lovers of little creatures in the York Region bureaucracy built a passageway for a rare four-inch salamander under Bayview Avenue, only to find that proposed subdivisions will block the migratory movements of the little lizards.
Cretins...
Now here is a word that has a wonderful sound to and has a nonsense for a meaning.
I love the way Free Republic increases my vocabulary
Well, not exactly. The vast majority of the camps were in Eastern Europe and were liberated by the Red Army, which also supplied far more of the men actually fighting Hitler than any other army.
But the Nazis were certainly anti-Christian.
Before Americans suck up to the UN, they should consider having Supreme Court decisions appealed to the UN.
And to you, Sir, as well!
Heteroflexible....
I like it.
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